Booking Through Thursday

What’s the largest, thickest, heaviest book you ever read? Was it because you had to? For pleasure? For school?

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell is the longest book I have read. I read it for pleasure but, since I read it in 8th grade, I got a lot of positive attention from adults and even some grudging admiration from peers. In part, I finished it for just that reason. It garnered so much attention that I couldn’t quit without it being a public failure.

The book was sitting on my desk when the question “Who wrote Gone with the Wind?” showed up on a social studies test. A fellow student half-heartedly accused me of cheating, just to see what the teacher would say. Mr. Shrum decreed that reading the book was pretty much the opposite of cheating.

I remember it took me three weeks to read because it was the first book that I ever renewed from the library—I couldn’t finish it in the allotted two weeks.